A word of encouragement from Pete Walker about the ongoing struggle in dealing with Flashbacks, and how setting your expectation can make a world of difference in your healing journey.
Also powerful is learning to just track the physical sensation without attaching any words. I had some trauma in adulthood and it was personally useful to me in healing.
When distressful feelings come up, just say with them, observing the somatic state/s mindfully. Almost immediately the somatic sensation will shift, deepen, lighten, or morph. It is NOT static; it moves. And it resolves on its own if you let it move. And it is less and less scary to stick with the body when you practice this, like riding a bike you gradually achieve balance in doing it and it becomes more and more automatic.
There is a trembling/discharge process when adrenalized feelings that were stuffed down in the body come up and release. This is quite safe if allowed and not feared.... just get into the child's pose and let it happen, or count breaths or whatever you may find most relaxing. Because it's how these feelings resolve and leave. (this is how 'the body keeps the score.') See Peter Levine.
It can be very powerful just to "surf" whatever physical sensations come up and to realize there is not any harm inherent in merely perceiving how your body feels or the energies within it. It can be very painful to have some of the emotions but that is an old iceberg, from ancient history and not current times. You already survived it, but it wasn't allowed to be processed at that time.
How true. Even though one will still have flashbacks, it is not the end fo the world. Learning coping strategies to ground yourself during and after a flashback is vital to regaining control and not avoiding places because a flashback may occur.
See Laurence Heller, "Healing Developmental Trauma." He is really brilliant about emotional flashbacks , how they present somatically, and how to resolve them.
My guess is the earlier the injury, the more terrifying and somaticized the feelings and flashbacks (wordless dread = preverbal). The intensity level is however scared, despairing, etc, a tiny child might have felt at the time of the injury.
Do you all at C-PTSD foundation think you could write up something about how these flashbacks could just be feelings in the body and how that works. I didn't know this until 4 months ago. I thought all flashbacks were memories with visual imagery. I must have got that idea from medical school. I think maybe a lot of people get confused on this point just like I did and experience these feelings and sensations in the body that can be really terrifying and confusing and people have no idea what is going on or what this could be and definitely have no idea this could be a flashback. I had absolutely no idea about these kinds of things as possibly being flashbacks but learning this has been really helpful to me and would probably be helpful information to other people too. Thanks
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